Employee Off Boarding Tips: Safeguard Your Company Data

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In a perfect world, employees leave your organization under amicable conditions. Your employee on-boarding process is simple and efficient, leading to very few wrong hires. The reality, however, is that some employees might leave your organization under hostile circumstances, which then leaves your organization’s sensitive data hanging in the balance. So how do you safeguard this sensitive data?

Make Sure You Have a Process

This process should ideally be easy enough to implement as soon as you begin your employee off boarding process. You should create a specific process for safeguarding your data with help from your IT department.

Disable All User Accounts

Shut down all network access and user workstations, change access passwords to phone systems and cloud storage, as well as access to business application lines. You might want to disable accounts of change passwords until you could reassign the access lines and workstation to a new employee.

Disable Access to Data Everywhere

As early as the employee on-boarding process, you must make it clear that all data your employees have access to, along with devices they use for work is company property. First off, all your employees must have signed a contract agreeing to the remote-wipe of their company devices if they leave your company and take a company device with them. This also applies to all email accounts. With a remote wipe, even your employees’ data might be lost, so you must encourage them to be honest if they want to leave the company or risk losing their data, along with your company data.

Adjusting the Workflow

Depending on the specific circumstances of the employee off boarding, the position your ex-employee left behind would likely be absorbed by someone in the company or taken over by a new hire. You must have a plan for redirecting emails for the vacated position. You must also tell your IT department to audit licenses for business application lines, company software and cloud services to make certain that they won’t be paying for extra licenses they don’t need.

It doesn’t matter if your company experiences little to no turnovers; it is your responsibility to safeguard not only your company data but those of your clients as well. Having a streamlined approach for managing this situation will come a long way in making certain that you are consistently protecting your clients and your company.